Home › Frozen Dishes › Chocolate (Cup ground coffee cup boiling)
Chocolate (Cup ground coffee cup boiling)
4 cup ground coffee ½ cup boiling water 2 tablespoons sugar teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons brandy Melt two squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate, add sugar and boiling water, boil two minutes. Scald the milk with coffee, strain, and add to chocolate with salt and brandy. Beat with Dover egg beater and serve with beaten cream.
A chocolate-coffee drink in the mocha family, thickened with a boiled chocolate syrup and finished with brandy. The ingredient list as printed has lost characters and one ingredient entirely, so read it with care before you start.
- The broken ingredient list"4 cup ground coffee" is almost certainly ¼ cup, and "teaspoon salt" a fraction of a teaspoon, most likely ⅛. The milk is named in the method but given no quantity anywhere, so the amount has to be judged by eye.
- Lowney's Premium ChocolateUnsweetened baking chocolate, sold in one-ounce squares by the Walter M. Lowney Company, which published this book. Any unsweetened baking chocolate works; two squares is two ounces.
- Boil the syrup, and mean itBoil the syrup -- The two minutes of boiling with sugar and water is the hinge of the method: it smooths the chocolate into a syrup before the milk goes in, which is presumably why the recipe insists on a timed boil rather than a simple melt.
- Scalding with coffeeScalded means heated to about 180F, when a ring of bubbles forms at the edge — not boiled. The ground coffee steeps in the hot milk and is then strained out; a fine sieve lined with a coffee filter or muslin catches the silt a plain strainer leaves behind.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A whisk or an immersion blender does the same job; the point is to froth the mixture before it goes into the cup.
- The brandyTwo tablespoons, added with the scalded milk and salt rather than cooked in. Leave it out for a non-alcoholic version without changing anything else.
- "Beaten cream"Cream whipped by hand, served on top.
- YieldCannot be fixed from the text, since the milk quantity is missing; the proportions suggest a small, rich after-dinner cup rather than a breakfast mug.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Hershey, published recipes as a way of promoting its chocolate. The chocolate recipes name the house brand, which is why the instruction reads "two squares Lowney's Premium" rather than simply two ounces of unsweetened chocolate. The pairing of chocolate and coffee was already long established in European drinking houses, and the addition of brandy and whipped cream suggests the sort of fortified after-dinner beverage often associated with the period.